


Black Sparks, Wolf's Eye, and the Inflammatory Article

by mustntgetmy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, First War with Voldemort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-08-17 09:33:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16513790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustntgetmy/pseuds/mustntgetmy
Summary: A re-imagining of the First War, wherein Remus never went to Hogwarts and instead runs a pro-werewolf, alternative paper, and Sirius is a lonely barfly, and they are both wary of starting something serious together while the war is on - but then the war ends.





	Black Sparks, Wolf's Eye, and the Inflammatory Article

He met him first at a bar, a dive near Knockturn Alley. Walked in and spotted him leaning against the wall, empty shot glass in his hand, eyes half-closed and head bobbing to the music. Just a look, that was all, that first night, but a look was all that was needed. Later he’d learn the name, the bloodline, the rumors of savagery. But then all he knew was the way the smoke curled from the cigarette held in his long, elegant fingers, the dark hair falling down to touch the pulse in his pale throat, and the way he held himself, that careless regality that marked him. A lie to say he didn’t stare, and a bigger lie to say he wasn’t stared at in turn. He smirked – or he was the one who watched the smirk appear, he can’t remember. But what he does remember is the way it felt, how despite the way that everything else around them seemed to be falling apart or ending, there was a charge in the air, a taste like something beginning.

 

…

 

It’s been four and a half days since Voldemort fell and Sirius is only now venturing out into the celebrations. James, the only one of them who had yet been out, said it feels like a funeral on New Year’s Eve, and he’s right. There are streamers and empty bottles of champagne on the streets, along with people slumped over and crying in a manner alternatively mournful and drunk. There’s a man at the mouth of Diagon Alley selling sparklers that give off what his sign says are “respectful” black sparks. Sirius passes him by, then goes back and buys two. It’s partly that he can’t resist and partly that he doesn’t want to go where he’s going empty-handed. He had – quite foolishly, he now thinks – thought to bring flowers or wine, but it seems that all the flowers in the Wizarding World now hang on the gates of their cemeteries, petals strewn without discrimination over the graves of both the victors and the vanquished.

 

But he has already done his time mourning at gravesides. He has buried his brother, his father, and more friends than he cares to count. He had watched them lower Voldemort’s body into an unmarked grave that morning, the last of his official duties to the Order, and restrained himself from throwing anything untoward in with the casket. It is time now, he thinks, to do something that has more to do with living than with death. It is time to begin something new at last.

 

This thought is how he finds himself outside the temporary offices of _The Every Moon Gazette_ , with the two sparklers he’s bought in his pocket and grave dirt still on his boots. Though the façade is far nicer than the old location and in fact occupies one of the Gringott’s marble tributaries, which stretch into the quaint alleys behind it, Sirius finds himself comparing it unfavorably to the old office with its tea-stained counters and Muggle concert posters overlapping one another on the walls. “Pink Floyd,” he can still hear Remus saying incredulously. “You’ve _never_ heard Pink Floyd? And yet you dare call my people heathens?”  _Half-breeds_ , he had corrected, by this time having spent enough time with him to joke.  _Semantics_ , Remus had returned.

 

He still flushes when he thinks of that night, one of the longer ones, that awful dread in the air, the sense that an attack was imminent. He was there to provide extra protection to the paper’s offices, the only one Dumbledore could spare, and he and Remus were alone, counting the hours, jumping at every slight noise. Or at least he had been jumpy; Remus, despite the fact that he had just made it to the top of Voldemort’s kill list, seemed no different than usual. Irate at the state of the office – ironic considering what came later – he paced and smoked and railed at his reporters for leaving half eaten candy in their desk drawers. “It’s not bad enough we’ve got pixies we need to have mice too?” he roared, causing Sirius to hiss at him for quiet. “Oh, simmer down there, pureblood boy,” Remus had said, tossing the candy in the bin. “It’s me they’re after, anyway. Not you.”

 

 _The Every Moon Gazette_ , which at that point was only a small weekly paper, had been printing anti-Death Eater articles for months. But it was because they were the only ones willing to call out the Ministry’s lack of action alongside the Death Eater atrocities that the Order – or mainly Moody and the Longbottoms, really – had spoken of them derisively as radicals and noisemakers. Or at least they did until Marlene McKinnon was killed and _The Every Moon Gazette_ was the first to respond with a blazing, audacious headline: VOLDEMORT, VOLDEMORT, VOLDEMORT: He’ll Kill You Anyway, So Why Not Say His Name?

 

The article that followed had been a no-holds-bar, and oftentimes crass (“Could he not get laid, do you think?”) takedown of the Dark Lord himself. Lines that had not yet been crossed in print were crossed and crossed again, beginning in the first line when he was referred to as Tommy Riddle. That alone would likely have been enough to propel Remus to Voldemort’s most wanted list, but Remus was far more relentless than merely using his given name and referring to him as a half-blood.

 

“Let’s make this clear, Tommy, so there are no surprises forthcoming,” he wrote. “You are not special. You are a run of the mill fascist clown, and you will be dealt with like the rest of the fascist clowns we’ve faced in the past. Grindelwald – pureblood and let’s be honest, here, Tom, far, far more charismatic – had but a five year run. I’ll give you one. Because, you forget, the kids were more genteel then, Tom. They sat back and let their elders do the work. But this is not the way things are anymore, old man. My generation has traded torch songs for punk rock. We thrash in mosh pits, spike our hair, talk back to our parents, and we won’t take your shit. But you know this already. That’s why you’ve gone after us so prodigiously, why we’re the ones you most want to recruit. That’s why you killed Marlene. That’s how you ended up with scores of her angry, grieving friends finally ready to raise a wand against you.

 

“Because I know they’re out there like I am, done with waiting. Hoping to be the lucky one who finds you, and gets to avenge our friend Marlene.

 

“So now, Tommy, you coward, you fear mongering ass, we are ready, we are angry – now, Tom, we come for you.”

 

Sirius may never forget the way he felt when he read that article, his fingers shaking against the page, his heart thrumming with an irregular beat, as if trying to match the same timbre that Remus’s heart had beat at when he’d written this. He had never in all his life felt like that when reading, not even when he’d been a lovesick sixth year and had ensconced himself in poetry, not even when he’d gotten the last letter he’d ever receive from his mother, formally and coldly cutting him off from his family. The fire Remus had written with found its way under his skin and he felt, more intensely than ever before, that something had to be done.

 

That was, in part, how he had wound up in _the Gazette_ offices with him that night: that burning need to turn his anger into action, doubly amplified by the way that others had reacted to the article, young witches and wizards flooding the streets with signs with Voldemort’s full name on them, holding vigils for Marlene and crying out, _never again_. Even people who hadn’t known her, people who had not until then chosen a side were out there: Remus had cut open a valve in them too, their hearts beat with his.

 

So that was part of it. The rest of it was that he was curious about Remus. Had been even before he’d ever known his name. He’d seen him before, and had gleaned a little bit about him over one or two drinks: scotch lover, democratic socialist, blindingly good kisser. But Remus was the kind of man who starts you talking, with a nudge here and there and a few pointed questions, and at the end of it you realize that you’ve learned nothing about him but that he’s clocked everything about you.

 

“You’re soft,” he’d told Sirius, the last time they’d met in the bar. “You’ve been given everything all your life – except what you really need.”

 

“And what do I need?”

 

“Someone who can take you down a peg,” he’d said with a toothy grin. “You’re not  _that_  good looking, you know.”

 

He had laughed then, so loud it surprised him. Who, he’d thought, who is this man?

So he had gone to stay in the offices with Remus the night after the article was published, feeling like it was his duty to Marlene, and also thinking you never learn better who someone is than when there’s a threat of violence in the air. For hours he watched Remus’s pacing, making an account of the crookedness of his gait, the fingers missing from one hand, and the scars that laced his tawny skin. It was his eyes that most people remarked on, the way that only one of them was human, but for Sirius the whole of him was remarkable: he had dreamed, and not just lately, of kissing all the silver in his hair.

 

But then Remus called him out for staring – “Look, should I pose? Strip down? Lay on a velvet settee? Let me know what you want now, but be warned my rate is exorbitant.” – and flushing he was forced to turn his attention elsewhere. So he flipped through the back issues of _the Gazette_ he found behind an editor’s desk, stopping wherever he saw Remus’s byline. He ran the gamut from album reviews to calls for political reform and each article contained a grain of the same intensity that had marked his call to arms against Voldemort.

 

“These are brilliant,” Sirius told him, feeling like that assessment fell short. “You’re good.”

 

“Oh, how fantastic that you approve! Now I can die happy.”

 

“Won’t be long now,” Sirius said without thinking, and to his surprise Remus laughed and stopped his pacing, settling down next to him on the editor’s desk. He lit two cigarettes, handed one to Sirius, and pointed at the article he had open. “She liked that one, Marlene did. Had it bad for Jagger in case you didn’t hear.” Sirius hadn’t heard, and yet he’d somehow known, though Marlene had never said and the article hadn’t either, that she and Remus had been close. And then Remus, perhaps caught on some memory of her, went on, and Sirius realized that Moody and the Aurors’ cursing about the recklessness of the article had been misplaced. He began to understand, as Remus spoke, that its brashness and its raging had belied a strategic cunning.

 

“She never gave away your secrets, you know,” Remus said. “But we talked about the war, we couldn’t not. And she mentioned something once to me, and I’ve never gotten it out of my head. She told me she felt like you really only have one advantage, and it’s not your secrecy or your spies or the quality of people you have in your ranks. She told me that every decisive victory you have has been because Voldemort had to split his forces between you and the main Auror contingent. She told me that if only there was another front he had to face, you lot could win the war. So now,” he said, drawing himself up, “with this, there is. Now, he will have to split his forces a third time and come for us as well.”

 

Us: werewolves, goblins, Squibs, outcasts of all stripes, the people and creatures the Ministry had decided did not deserve the full rights of wizards. In peacetime they’d been alternatively ignored and abused, but now in the late hours of the war there was a growing awareness that they could be the ones to tip the balance toward victory. So the Ministry and Dumbledore had made their clumsy, patronizing overtures for an alliance, and Voldemort had offered his usual Faustian bargains, but it had been Remus who had drawn them en masse. Unlike the others, the promises he made were not theoretical, to be paid out when the war was won. The jobs he offered began the day they walked in the door, and he gave them shelter without judgment, and without proselytizing to them about how they could change, how they could be more human or how they should give in to their lesser natures, as Voldemort urged them to do.  For this he’d won their loyalty, and Sirius had seen enough of the way they were with him to know it was absolute. Just that evening when he’d arrived he’d seen how many of them had still been in the offices, and the way they’d arrayed themselves in a protective circle around Remus when he’d walked in, and he had known, without a doubt, that they would lay down their lives for him.

And then Remus had sent them home, shooed them out in a manner alternatively curmudgeonly and coddling, “It’s alright now, snap that soppy look off your face, it’s alright, I’ll be fine, Christ, what are you crying for, it’s not a funeral!”

 

Remus had wanted the Death Eater’s first strike, likely to be the most vicious, to fall on him alone. Well, him and Sirius. After that, he promised them, they would stand together.

 

It was two am when they finished the last of the cigarettes, passing one back and forth until it was just a bit of smoke and an ember. The street outside had gone silent, and when the ember at the end of the cigarette flickered out into nothing Remus leaned over and turned out the light. For a moment, they just breathed together in the dark, their legs pressed up against each other, the weight of the silence pressing down on their skin. Sirius could feel Remus’s gaze on him, and he turned to meet it, his one eye glowing green, eerie and provoking. An instinctual chill went through him, prey beneath a predator’s eyes, and he knew enough to know that he was done for. Because here, he knew, was danger, and he had always loved that sort of thing.

 

“They’re here,” Remus whispered, though Sirius couldn’t hear a thing, not a whisper in the wind or a shifting in the air.

 

He went for his wand and stood, carefully and at the ready.

 

“Before this starts, you ought to know something about me,” Remus said, still sitting atop the desk, his wolfish eye burning through the dark, the flickering sound of a spell coming through from the other side of the office door.

 

“Yeah? What’s that?”

 

Remus flicked a lighter, tossed it towards the door, and said, quite calmly, “I don’t fight fair.”

 

The Death Eaters burst in, black robes swirling, and the office of _The Every Moon Gazette_ went up in flames around them.

 

…

 

Alright, so they had, perhaps, done more than look at each other across the bar. He had, perhaps, leaned in to lick the sweat from his neck. He had, perhaps, felt the soft inner lining of his jeans as he undid his flies. He had, perhaps, gone over to his, just the once, to make fun of his posh sitting room and mess up his bed. He had – maybe – watched him while he slept, his dark hair fanned across the pillow, his skin milk white and as luminous and as impossible to look away from as that damnable moon.

 

And he had – and this he’ll admit only under duress – lingered in the morning to kiss the crown of his head, and hoped that he alone of all of them would, somehow, amid all this death and destruction, find a way to make it through.

 

…

 

The new offices have a foyer and a receptionist’s desk, a gleaming oak behemoth, inlaid with carvings of the phases of the moon. When Sirius comes in the receptionist is rolling joints on top of it and humming Wagner along with the radio. “Spoils of war,” she tells Sirius, and he can’t tell if she means the desk, or the weed, or perhaps just the music. The Wizarding Wireless Network – briefly taken over by Death Eaters near the end of things – is back on for the first time since Voldemort fell.

 

“Where is he?” he asks her, and she doesn’t need him to clarify.

 

“In the back,” she says, “threatening to kill an editor over an Oxford comma again, probably.” She lights a joint and Sirius has to repress a shudder. The sound of a lighter gets to him now, he can’t help but picture the flames encircling the old _Gazette_ offices, their ravenous heat, the way they moved as if sentient. They didn’t burn – they weren’t Fiendfyre – or at least they didn’t burn flesh. Remus had managed something else with them, made it so they would only burn wandwood. “Put it away!” he’d shouted at Sirius, shoving his wand hand. He’d only just managed to stick it back in his cloak when the Death Eaters started screaming: first, because of their wands, and then because of Remus. He shudders again when he thinks of Remus’s bloodied knuckles in the dawn light, the Death Eaters tied up and kicking as Sirius spread salve over each of his injuries. He remembers the relief he’d felt holding his hand, feeling his steady pulse beneath his thumb, and is surprised when he makes it to the back of the new offices, and sees that same shocked relief now mirrored in Remus’s eyes.

 

“You’re alive,” he says, so flatly that Sirius almost doesn’t hear the fragile tilt to the last word. “No one sent word otherwise, so I suppose I figured you were. Only I know they’re still identifying some of the bodies and your people won’t let anyone near the last battlefield so I suppose I also figured you weren’t and –”

 

“I’m here,” Sirius says, stopping the onrush of Remus’s voice by placing his hand atop his, and rubbing his thumb over each knuckle.

 

Something goes soft and vulnerable in Remus’s eyes – even, and perhaps especially the wolf one – for just a moment, and then he snaps, “Oh for God’s sake not here. I do my blubbering in the alley now we’ve got one. Have you seen our alley? No? Come on then.”

 

It’s out there that he gives Remus the sparklers. Remus laughs and looks pleased when the sparks turn out black. “How perfectly irreverent,” he says with relish, and when his burns down to ash Sirius gives him the second one.

 

“I almost brought flowers,” he confesses.

 

“Oh, dear. Did you think I was dead too?”

 

Sirius shakes his head. “No, I…I just wanted to bring you something. I don’t know, I just figured…”

 

Remus nods, not needing him to finish. He watches the black sparks arc away from the stick a moment before he says, “Do you remember what I told you? The third or so night we met at that ridiculous bar?”

 

“Good Lord, Remus, was I supposed to memorize the soliloquy you gave me that night?”

 

Remus laughs. “You were supposed to memorize the salient parts, yeah, but don’t worry, I’ll remind you.” He flicks away the last few sparks, watches them bounce against the alley wall. “I told you, you need someone to put you in your place.”

 

Sirius nods, feels something tense inside him, wonders why he ever thought this would work.

 

“But what I didn’t add,” Remus goes on, “is ‘gently.’ You need someone to put you in your place – but gently. Which just so happens to be what I need someone to do to me. Tell me off when I’m wrong or when it matters, don’t just yes me to death because you want to shag, let me be who I need to be and still care for me when what I am is bloodied and howling, make me better but don’t change me, you know. Be good to me, and I’ll be good to you. So. That’s what you can give me.”

 

He lets out a sigh of breath, and doesn’t quite meet Sirius’s eyes.

 

“And a key,” Sirius whispers, when he gets his voice back. “I’ll give you all that – and a key. To my flat. If you want it. And me.”

 

“Oh, you ridiculous bastard,” Remus says, smiling and grabbing him by the shirt collar. “You’re all I’ve ever wanted.”

 

Sirius’s beaming grin is smothered out by a kiss and then another and another. They’re hard kisses, but shaky as a newfound treaty, and Sirius feels within them that same promise, that this could be something new, that this could be something better. That, maybe, together, they could be at peace.

 

…

 

He can’t properly explain to himself, in the light of dawn, why he should be here, his few belongings – three books, fifteen records, a half empty bottle of scotch, and a picture of his parents – marking the flat so that it was a place no longer singular but plural. Not his, ours. Not I, us. He can’t fathom how this happened. He’d never thought he was the settling down kind, and especially not with a blueblood pureblood.

 

So he almost goes, that first morning, when he looks around and finds the tastefulness of the bedroom furniture suffocating – all gilt and antiques and thousand Galleon sheets – and sees out the window the view of a quaint little park with a locked and high fenced gate. He’s got his shoes on, he’s at the door, he’ll go back for his things later once he’s had time to think of an explanation – but then he doesn’t turn the knob. He can hear him stirring on the bed, can see from the door his arm thrown across the pillow, slowly moving, looking for him as he dreams.

 

He goes back. He stays. And there are fights, and discrepancies that come of being raised in entirely different ways and of having lived entirely different lives, but somehow the hurts are always mended, and the apologies carefully made. And after a while when he wakes early he begins to stop asking himself why he should be here, and starts asking himself, why should he be anywhere else? Why not stay with this man who loves him, with all his strangeness and his ranting? This one person who does not insist that he be civil, bite his tongue and pretend that he is not what he is?

 

There are no good answers to this. And so he stays, alright, he stays, and it is more than he ever thought it could be, more than he ever thought a single look across a bar would bring him. So he stays a month, six months, a year, three years, and then, as it happens, he never quite manages to find a reason to leave.


End file.
